“Dante,” I beseeched again. “You said you wouldn’t leave me alone in this.”
His eyes sliced up to his brother, filled with glittering acrimony like an obsidian blade, and then back at me. I watched his fists clench and unclench as he fought with his decision.
Fear bloated under my skin like infected tissues, filling me with the uneasy belief that he might walk out my door and never again return.
“Ti voglio bene, fratello,” I told him.
I love you, brother.
Because the fractured brotherhood between Alexander and Dante might never be mended, but Dante and I would always be siblings of the heart.
He smiled thinly at me and turned to pick up his discarded gun before tucking it into the back of his waistband. His eyes were carefully void as they swept over me in Alexander’s embrace, and when he walked by me to the door, and said, “I’m sure you know by now that sometimes love is not enough,” it wrecked me just as surely as one of his bullets to my heart might have killed me.
Cosima
“If you tell me you slept with my brother, I’ll kill him.”
I was in the kitchen pouring a large glass of Glenfiddich scotch when Alexander said the words calmly, factually as if discussing the weather.
I ignored him, focusing on my task as I pulled two crystal cut tumblers out of the cabinet and filled them with three generous fingers of the amber liquor. Without offering the second glass to Alexander, I tipped the first to my lips and let the flaming liquid score a line of heat down the back of my throat. I dropped the empty one to the black granite countertop and tossed back the second before refilling one and offering one to Xan.
“Drink?” I asked slightly breathless from the burn of the alcohol.
I needed the bracing pain to settle me moments after Dante had stormed out. My stomach was cold with indecision and the fear that my Dante was gone for good. I needed the heat of the scotch to burn the feeling away, if only for a while.
Alexander stared at me through the shadows of my unlit apartment, the dark making his glower dominate his forehead like a crown of thorny anger.
“Cosima, if you slept with my brother, I promise you, I will kill him,” he repeated, this time with all the considerable force of his dominant personality and ire behind the words.
I wrung my hands together and wondered briefly if I should tell him the truth.
I had slept with Dante. Many times.
When I first moved to New York City, I was a mess of emotions barely contained by thin skin and brittle bones. I cried more than I spoke, and it took me weeks to smile.
Only Dante brought me solace, a hot shot of scotch whiskey to soothe my hollow belly, a velvet blanket wrapped around my shoulders to stave a cold even sharper than the one I’d felt my first few weeks in Pearl Hall’s ballroom.
He held me until I slept, force-fed me, and tried everything to make me smile.
I’d substituted one Master for another, though Dante was considerably kinder and infinitely less harmful to my heart. He’d even befriended Sinclair when I’d lived with him in an attempt to rope another person into a tag team to get me out of the house and living again.
“Yes.” I looked Alexander straight in the eye as I confessed, my chin tipped high, my shoulders squared. I wouldn’t be made to feel ashamed for my need or my relationship with his brother. “I slept with him dozens of times when I first arrived, though neither of us really slept.”
Alexander’s rage perfumed the air like gasoline and hot stone. I knew he was ready to explode, to break apart into an inferno he didn’t have the right to light.
I held up one hand to stop him and willed it not to shake.
It was a wonder I was even standing after everything I’d been through as of late, so I let myself have the slight tremble in my fingers.
“I had hellacious nightmares that kept me up for hours. I’d wake up sobbing and thrashing so hard, I would have hurt myself if Dante didn’t hold me down, and even then, sometimes I’d hurt him. I cried so much I went cold, and my body trembled so hard from the shock of it I couldn’t hold still enough to fall asleep at all. He lay beside me through all of it because he knew, unlike anyone else in my life, not even my family, especially not them, that I’d been through hell and come back to the world of the living something other than fully human. Something haunted and broken and dark.”
I slanted a long, sizzling glance at Alexander, hating him at that moment the same way I had three years ago after he’d eviscerated me in Milan.